Vehicle Finance Customer Journey
Improving understanding and decision-making in a lending product used by 1.7M+ customers
Company
UK regulated lender
Date
2024–2025
Project Overview
Context
Vehicle finance journeys are fragmented by design. Customers interact with brokers and dealers, while the lender sits in the background as the decision-maker and long-term relationship holder.
This creates a critical gap:
customers often don’t fully understand who they are borrowing from, what their agreement means, or what to do when their situation changes.
Many customers also arrive after being declined elsewhere, increasing emotional pressure and the need for clarity, trust, and support.
My Role
Led the end-to-end redesign of the vehicle finance journey, working across product, operations, risk, and technology.
Mapped the full journey across brokers, internal systems, and customer touchpoints
Identified key breakdowns where ownership, clarity, and experience were lost
Used customer and frontline insights to prioritise the highest-impact problems
Translated insights into improvements in product flows, communications, and internal processes
Worked with cross-functional teams to implement clearer journeys and decision points
Key Insight
For many customers, this wasn’t just a loan; it was access, trust, and a second chance.
Customers repeatedly expressed loyalty and gratitude: “You were the only one who gave me a chance.”
This shifted the design approach from managing a financial product to supporting people through high-stress moments with clarity and reassurance.
Key Highlights
Outcomes
Created a shared end-to-end journey across product, operations, and servicing teams, aligning previously disconnected areas
Simplified customer communications (letters, explanations, key touchpoints) to improve understanding and reduce confusion
Improved internal guidance and handling of complex customer situations, increasing consistency across teams
Identified and reduced key friction points caused by system fragmentation and manual workarounds
Translated customer and operational insights into requirements for a major technology transformation programme
Enabled faster decision-making by grounding product and process changes in real customer behaviour
Redesigned customer letters explaining repayments and arrears to make next steps clearer and reduce repeat contact
By grounding requirements in real customer and operational journeys, the work reduced reliance on lengthy, waterfall-style discovery and helped teams move faster with greater confidence.
Why this matters
When lending is complex and indirect, trust becomes everything.
Designing with the realities of customers’ lives and frontline teams’ constraints in mind helps organisations deliver better outcomes, build loyalty, and avoid unnecessary harm.
This work showed how product and service design can create clarity not only for customers, but across the organisation.
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